Major Cache of Fossils Unearthed In Los Angeles

aedmunde sends along news from the LA Times: "A nearly intact mammoth, dubbed Zed, is among the remarkable discoveries near the La Brea Tar Pits. It's the largest known deposit of Pleistocene ice age fossils... in what might seem to be the unlikeliest of places — under an old May Co. parking lot in L.A.'s tony Miracle Mile shopping district. ...huge chunks of soil from the site have been removed intact and now sit in large wooden crates on the back lot... The 23 crates range... from the size of a desk to that of a small delivery truck... There were, in fact, 16 separate deposits on the site, an amount that, by her estimate, would have taken 20 years to excavate conventionally. ... Carefully identifying the edges of each deposit, her team dug trenches around them and underneath, isolating the deposits on dirt pedestals. After wrapping heavy plastic around the deposits, workers built wooden crates similar to tree boxes and lifted them out individually with a heavy crane. The biggest one weighed 123,000 pounds."

Re:10 000 - 40 000 years old fossils?

[schnikies79]

Way to re-hash the same 'ole shit over, and over, and over. It wasn't funny a year ago, It's not funny now. Yes people think that way, everyone here knows that. You know what? The only ones I hear bringing it up every discussion I read is you guys making fun of it. The people that actually believe talk about it less.

It's off-topic and it's annoying.

123,000 pounds in modern money?

[fantomas]

What's that in less historic money? ;-)

interesting - do you guys over the pond use tons for big numbers or do you stick to pounds all the way up? Curious about the expression "123,000 pounds" - isn't that something like 100 tons or so? (he says plucking a figure out the air and being lazy ;-) )

Here we'd say kg for small numbers, but once we'd got to a thousand we'd shift to (metric) tons, e.g. "over 123 tons" not "over 123,000 kg". Or is that domain specific? do some things get measured in pounds all the way up, but others you shift into talking about tons? What do you measure aircraft carriers etc in? millions of pounds?

Great news though on the main topic, it will keep some university researchers happily employed for a good while!

Re:The pope?

[Asic Eng]

The "loony left" in this case includes noted left wingers like John McCain and Giuliani , chairmen of oil companies, just about every government of the first world, the vast majority of published climate scientists ...

Re:10 000 - 40 000 years old fossils?

[operagost]

Thanks, Captain Hyperbole. I'm sure that a small contingent of people who wish to believe something you don't will threaten our way of life. They must be exterminated! By the way, about as many people believed in creationism both before and after the Dark Ages, so I dare say that it is not a reasonable indicator of "social progress."